Christmas Newsletter mailshot time

Another cloudy day with occasional showers. I woke up at half past seven, posted the Morning Prayer YouTube link to WhatsApp, listened to Thought for the Day, and fell asleep again until ten to nine. It's getting to be a habit.

I went to the Eucharist at St John's. There were five of us with Meg who celebrated. I went to Tesco's afterwards to get our foodbank donation and then returned and had coffee before returning home. I had some last minute edits to make on Sway, then more material came in, so I was again late starting to cook lunch, but Sway was ready to send at two, the usual deadline. 

When I started Mailchimp, it asked me to verify my login with a pass code via SMS or email. The last time I had to do this was at the end of August. I have no access to the email account or the mobile phone the passcode is destined for, so I sent a message to Rachel who has admin rights over these accounts, and just had to wait for a response and an opportunity to agree a time when this info can be transmitted. Why it should happen now I have no idea.

I went for a walk in the park and returned at five to rendezvous with Rachel in order to get the Mailchimp security passcode from her. After gaining access to the account, the matter of updating the mailing list and sending out this week's Sway link was completed very quickly, much to my relief. Then I was free to work on assembling the annual letter and Christmas card to about forty people. Label printing first, then supper and later in the evening, an hour of envelope stuffing and stamp mounting. Clare had already sent another dozen with parcels and letters. 

Tomorrow I'll see to the digital mail-out of the letter and greetings to another forty recipients in distant places. This year's postage bill for parcels and letters was over seventy quid. It's not only inflation pushing up the cost, but the huge drop in ordinary postal traffic due to the rise in digital greeting cards and emails, driving up the sending price per unit because staff numbers and equipment required are much the same, whether the revenue from postage rises or falls.

When I look at today's mailing list compared to when I retired thirteen years ago, it's amazing to think how many former recipients, friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues have died, or are lost contact with for other reasons. The stream of life flows own. We go with it, but will eventually get left behind. It's fifty five years since I sent out copies of our newsletter while I was training in St Mike's, and have continued to do so ever since. Why bother? It's simple really. Telling our family story to any who might be interested in our life together is to my mind part of the bedrock of our identity. I wonder how many recipients down the years kept copies tucked away somewhere. I know I didn't, until I started using and storing things on a computer. back in the late 1980s. I've not yet trawled through my archives to see how many I can find. Perhaps one day I'll get around it. Right now it's time for bed,            

Story of a street name

Much rain overnight and showers for much of the day. I went for my 'flu jab at the King's Road Pharmacy straight after breakfast. Mother Frances messaged me just after I got back, flagging up a strange anomaly in the Mailchimp distribution, with her personalised email addressed to Jesse, not to herself. A web-server glitch? Or a catastrophic mailing list database failure? No other complaints so far, or a simple data entry typo from some time in the past? Fortunately that's what had happened, I discovered when I examined the mailing list in detail. I couldn't edit the entry however, and ended up removing it, together with two other email addresses of people who have died, one of them a couple of years ago.

Clare bought a salmon for freezing from Ashton's in the market yesterday. While I was writing a sermon for Sunday, she cooked a lovely fish soup for lunch with the head and bones left from filleting. She had a flute lesson after lunch, so I went out for a walk. It started to rain, so I took shelter outside Cafe Castan and had a cup of coffee, waiting for the rain to stop, then walked to the other end of Llandaff Fields and caught a bus into town at the stop near the junction. The bus was crowded with students returning from college so I had to stand all the way into town.  

I visited John Lewis to see if there were any bargains to be had, and chatted with a young woman in the tech' section, wearing a Chromebook tee shirt and hovering around the display. She told me she'd not long returned from a year in Hungary as part of her business studies degree. Now she has the travel bug and is wondering where next to look for work. I think she was slightly surprised to learn I was an early adopter of the Chromebook over ten years ago. On balance, I use mine for everyday tasks more than I use my two Windows machines, which serve mainly for easy audio and video editing plus mailshots. I am thinking of buying a device with more RAM to use for running Linux apps, now that Chrome OS has been enhanced to make this possible, but before I do, I need to find out how feasible this would be. I'd certainly like to be able to use Linux again on a daily basis.

I caught the 25 bus to the top of Cathedral Road, then walked into the park before going home. There, I bumped into Peter and Jan walking their dogs, and we chatted for a while. Jan is a member of the Church in Wales electoral college which meets in the coming week to elect a new Bishop of St Davids. I wonder who will be elected? Jan says changes in electoral procedure are now in place that have improved the process, with preliminary briefing papers on prospective candidates available before a decision on nominating a voting short list is made. This is, I believe, intended to inform decision making and refine the selection of possible candidates with sufficient support to be electable in the ballot process. Let's hope it works as it's intended to.

Above, I mentioned Cathedral Road. Rufus told me yesterday how he learned about the origin of its name from Peter, who I met in the park this afternoon, when he was at St Mike's. Cathedral Road doesn't lead to Cathedral Road, and never did. It was named after the prestigious Victorian Welsh Presbyterian Church that still stands at the west end of the road. 

In the nineteenth century Welsh Calvinistic Methodism was a major force in the social development of urban industrial Wales, said whether true or not, to have enjoyed the adherence of half the population. This building was its most prominent in the capital city, but why call it a Cathedral when its pastoral oversight is performed by a council of elders, not a Bishop? 

French theologian Jean Calvin, caught up almost by chance in Geneva's independence struggles in the 1520's made a  major contribution to reforming church and society in the city state, advocating a new form of governance that didn't rely on episcopal hierarchy, but a council of church elders. Two centuries later his way of thinking was influential in the Methodist revival in Britain, and especially in Wales. Geneva's St Pierre Cathedral was one of only three churches which wasn't closed for worship at the time. It's a place where his memory is still honoured, a mother church of the protestant reformation. The road was named after the church building regarded as the Welsh equivalent of 'Calvin's Cathedral'. 

Sadly, in the last quarter of the twentieth century Welsh Calvinistic Methodism went into steep decline, losing almost all of its buildings. Ninety years after its opening in 1903, the congregation moved into the church hall and the main building was converted internally into three floors of offices. For fifteen years it was the headquarters of homelessness charity 'The Wallich'. It's now been acquired by Red Rose school, an independent special educational needs establishment. No longer a place of worship, but still very much in the service of vulnerable people, in the spirit of Calvinistic social thinking.

Clare was out when I got home. She'd gone to 'Amser Jazz' at the Royal Welsh College. I watched the news on telly, listened to the radio and waited for her to return so we could eat together. Then, this week's episode of Norwegian crimmie 'For Life' before turning in for the night.

Digital distribution dolor

A damp overcast day with bouts of drizzle. I got up early, having lost an hour's sleep by waking up at two in the morning, to find the room bathed in moonlight, as I'd forgotten to shut the curtains. The clouds had thinned out to reveal the Blue Moon I didn't get any clear shots of last night at ten. I'd brought my best two cameras down from the loft to the bedroom in case I did wake up to a clear sky. By this time the moon was fast disappearing behind the gable end of the house where the second chimney once stood, so I took several shots with each, and then returned to sleep. 

I processed the pictures after breakfast. They weren't very sharp, being hand held shots. I didn't have the presence of mind to set up a tripod before going to bed, and relied on automatic settings. Serves me right. Some photos taken with my Olympus OM1-D were interesting as the white clouds around the moon were shown tinged with orange, reflecting urban light pollution I suppose.

I then moved on to drafting Sunday's sermon and finalising this week's edition of the Parish Sway and posting it the link on WhatsApp before stopping to cook lunch. All worked well at this point. After we'd eaten, I had to send out the same link in the weekly email distribution using MailChimp. I followed the instruction notes I'd written but couldn't establish how to send out this week's instead of last week, as the obvious task of finding and using the link edit page didn't work as I expected. By trial and error,  and half a dozen attempts I succeeded in doing it correctly. As for the error bit, I reset this week's Sway link at some stage, which removed access to the web page I created while cloning its content to a new one. Then the proper page link had to be reissued on WhatsApp, to match what worked via Gmail and Facebook.

The ten minute task of checking and sending the MailChimp link took me two and a half hours to sort out and correct. Hopefully, I'll get my head around it all with a few practice runs this week, so it soon becomes a routine. Important that it does as the plan is for me to do it for a six weeks then hand over to someone to be recruited and train them in using Sway and MailChimp if they don't know how. Chatting with Owain after I returned from a visit to the shops and a walk in the park before supper, I discovered that he has used MailChimp for years and is acquainted with Sway, though he has a low opinion of it.  When next he visits us, I'll ask him to give me an expert tutorial on MailChimp's finer points.

Clare had supper early as she went out to explore a new local choir she's thinking of joining, leaving me to my own devices, so I indulged in baked beans on toast for a change. Then I watched this week's episode of 'The Woman in the Wall' on iPlayer. Interesting, complex plot development, but rather too many visuals of the nightmare trauma of an abused woman whose baby was stolen from her in a convent that served as Magdalene Laundry while pretending to be a training school (aka 'reform school', in the language of my youth) for wayward girls. 

Amazing that pious people responsible for such institutions could think they were doing anything good for young people by intimidation and cruel harsh treatment. At one time it was taken for granted, as 'normal'. Thank heavens profound changes in attitude have occurred in the past quarter of a century in how vulnerable disturbed young people are treated. Repentance of a kind, but the loss experienced by many is incalculable. Stories of this kind need to be told. Fact based dramatic fiction, as long is it is true to real life is a good means for exploring such painful issues of social injustice.

Handover achieved

I slept the usual amount of time, seven plus hours, but it was unsettling light sleep and I woke up feeling thick headed, as if I'd hardly slept at all. It's been a cool cloudy day with showery episodes. Forecasted hot spells this summer have simply not arrived here, or elsewhere in Britain for that matter. 

After breakfast, I had an online rendezvous with Mother Frances to hand over the Parish MailChimp login so I can distribute the weekly Sway link. Login takeover on my laptop was successful, enough to get me started, but I wanted to do the same on my desktop workstation and Chromebook, so I'm insured against a system failure with a critical distribution deadline looming. Enabling a new device to run this web based app requires a secondary access code delivered by email to the Parish Office account. 

With one device secured, I dived into MailChimp, and found a complex user interface, built for marketing and publicity clients, using vocabulary foreign to me. At this point, Frances was about to go to a handover  meeting with Iona, so there wasn't time to finish off. I agreed to join her at Iona's and continue the tutorial on using MailChimp. I've got my handwritten notes now to remind me of what I need to know hands on with this software, but the session itself was not without its worries, as Iona's computer was playing up and the laptop Frances brought didn't have the parish Gmail account details on it to enable Iona to gain access to MailChimp if she could have used her own device, so that's a task for another day. 

When we left Iona's house it was drizzling rain. I didn't have a top coat and Frances was on her bike, so we both got damp. Nevertheless, when she got back, it was possible to get MailChimp to work on my desktop computer. Chromebook can wait for now.There are good reasons for having two stage security working with apps that deal with mail-shots, but it is such a fiddle when you don't have all the account details you need in one place. It's easy to overlook a detail that can stall your progress.

I worked on this week's Sway after lunch with new photos and texts to add, then went for a walk until it was time for supper. Afterwards, I indulged in a third episode of Lolita Lobosco, which had even more comic dialogue in it than the first two, much of it dedicated to pretentious foodie talk. It was about the murder of a popular restauranteur who was also a secret loan shark and child abuser - the dark underside of light entertainment.

The sky was clear of cloud as I got ready for bed and I got a good look at the rising moon as I got ready for bed. I wonder if the sky will be clear tomorrow night when the moon is full. If so, it will indeed be once in a blue moon. Such a cloudy summer.